Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The other day, I was driving to a meeting when I hit unexpected traffic on the 580. Bay Area residents know this feeling all too well—you managed to make it out of the house 10 minutes early and you’re on track for a speedy arrival, but your plans are upended by an impenetrable block of vehicles that stretches as far as the eye can see.
As I was sitting in my car, waiting my turn in the stop-and-go river, I started thinking: is there such a thing as good traffic? Obviously not if you have somewhere to be, but when it comes to your company’s presence online, the answer is a resounding “YES.” In today’s digital world, your best potential customers judge your company by your website and what they find about you online before they even meet you. Simply put, if you don’t have a strong web presence, you won’t be able to compete in a crowded marketplace. Thankfully, if your company earns Diamond Certified, you’ll have a huge advantage in that department.
We’ve spent the past decade developing online tools and building our expertise in order to put your company at the forefront of the digital world. We’ve created custom content that makes your website more robust, improved your SEO so more people can find you and added Google Stars to your search results. We also purchased Nu-Designs Digital, a 20-year-old digital marketing company that has greatly improved our online marketing, SEO and website creation expertise. Year after year, we’ve been getting better at maximizing your online presence, and 2018 saw us make huge leaps in three crucial categories:
Organic Google Search
We saw a significant increase in organic Google search impressions in 2018. For years, we’ve hovered around 50,000 impressions per month, but last year, we saw that number slowly double until it reached a total of 22,993,867. This is important for two reasons: 1) it’s a sign that our redesigned website is performing well and 2) it proves that our focus on improving Diamond Certified companies’ online presence is working. This massive swell in organic search impressions has resulted in more clicks, more traffic to our website and, most importantly, more visibility for your company on Google.
Our organic Google search impressions doubled in 2018, which has led to increased traffic to diamondcertified.info and more Google visibility for Diamond Certified companies. Source: Google Search Console
Diamond Certified Website Page Views
We’ve always had great traffic on diamondcertified.info, but 2018 was a record year for us in terms of page views: 1,640,141. As usual, we saw a dip around the holiday season, but January 2019 started strong with 186,593 page views, which is a 124 percent increase (83,191) over January 2018. It’s clear that Bay Area consumers are visiting diamondcertified.info whenever they need to find top rated companies, Helpful Expertise® and researched advice.
Page views on diamondcertified.info hit a new record in 2018: more than 1.6 million. Bay Area consumers know to visit the Diamond Certified website whenever they need to find quality companies. Source: Google Analytics
Mobile Web Traffic
This is the area where we’ve seen the most significant improvements, undoubtedly because it has received a lot of attention from our entire team. The changes we made to our website in 2018 helped mobile traffic steadily grow as the year progressed. Overall, our focused approach led to a 42 percent increase in traffic, the majority of which was in Q4, which saw a 133 percent gain compared to Q4 2017.
Mobile traffic to diamondcertified.info was up 42% in 2018, most of which was in the last four months of the year. We expect to see big growths again in 2019 with the expansion of our mobile site.
This data shouldn’t come as much of a surprise—in today’s digital world, mobile plays an important role in our daily lives. According to Statista, 52 percent of all worldwide online traffic in 2018 was generated through mobile phones, which is up from 50 percent in 2017. In fact, BrightEdge reports that 57 percent of all online traffic in the United States now comes from smartphones and tablets. Your customers are turning to their mobile devices when they need help from local experts, so it’s absolutely critical that your company is easy to find in search.
The success of our mobile web traffic efforts has informed many of our plans for 2019. This year, we’ll continue to improve the mobile experience for users, which will lead to more Quality Customers finding and choosing your company. We’re currently developing and testing major enhancements to both our mobile and desktop sites, and we’re excited to share what we have in store. I’ll announce more news about the designs and additional features in the coming months.